ORIGINALLY written by Noel Coward in 1932 to be performed by himself and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the married golden couple of American drama, the ironically-entitled Design For Living has always been a bold but contentious piece, concerning itself with a bisexual menage à trois whose members pursue each other across the Western world.

In the stuffy days of the thirties, this was considered shocking stuff, and Coward surely only avoided the censorious attentions of the Lord Chamberlain by first staging the play on Broadway, where, perhaps not wholly coincidentally, he and the Lunts commanded record-breaking fees for their performances.

Marianne Elliott's stylish production at the Royal Exchange updates the setting to the modern day and endeavours to recreate that original frisson of naughtiness by making the play's polymorphous sexuality relatively explicit and including a couple of brief scenes of full-frontal male nudity. The result is somewhat less than engaging, unfortunately, which is even more disappointing as Elliott's sexually-playful productions have been among the best to be seen at the Exchange in recent years.

Coward himself observed that his three principal characters - Otto the painter (Oliver Milburn); Leo the playwright (Clarence Smith); and Gilda the society decorator (Victoria Scarborough) - are "glib, over-articulate and amoral characters" who "force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves".

But, when Victoria Scarborough, as Gilda, starts proceedings off with a monotonous rant that quite distinctly lacks the "wild gleam" which Otto and Leo supposedly see in her, the stage is set for an evening in which one's interest in these characters can often be less than that in the style-supplement worthy sets, especially as the action progresses from the opening act in bohemian Paris to a second act in celebrity-obsessed London and a third in brittly-superficial New York.

The various couplings that follow the initial discovery of Gilda, post-tryst with Leo - despite the fact that she's all but married to Otto - take on a sort of grim inevitability rather than seeming like the sometimes-faltering steps in an otherwise elegant dance of sexual confusion. This trio are defiantly out of step with all those around them, including the arch art dealer Ernest (Ken Bones, whose final explosion of exasperation is one of the production's high points), but we should surely care more about their dilemmas than we do here.

Design for Living is at The Royal Exchange until August 10.

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